Tips to Ensure AWS HIPAA Compliance

The world of healthcare, especially in this digital age, is fraught with myriad risks. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is a United States law that aims to protect the privacy of patients’ medical records and other health information. This includes a collection of rules and protections for the management of electronically stored patient data that seek to prevent any untoward incidents and protect patients’ privacy. It aims to make health insurance coverage available to everyone — even those who lose their jobs. This also aims to lower the cost of healthcare by setting up standards in the electronic transmission of financial and administrative transactions. Any medical company setting up a digital solution is required to ensure compliance with HIPAA. This can be a challenge but only if you don’t have the right platform. Thankfully, this is not a problem with AWS Cloud, a cloud computing platform, since it delivers an offering that is not only highly dependable but also affordable and scalable. These are important qualities for a cloud platform to properly support healthcare companies’ digital tools and products in a manner that is compliant with the requisite regulations such as HIPAA. Now, before we discuss the best practices to ensure HIPAA compliance with AWS Cloud, let us first understand if the cloud service is compliant with this particular set of medical regulations. Simply put, AWS Cloud is conducive to ensuring compliance with HIPAA, but the platform cannot individually deliver the requisite compliance. What happens is that AWS Cloud provides companies with a variety of tools and services to help achieve the required compliance with the regulations. This means AWS Cloud and its services can be reliably used to efficiently set up, maintain, and ensure the safe movement of confidential patient data. With that cleared up, let us now move and discuss what we came here to talk about, i.e. tips and best practices to achieve HIPAA compliance with the AWS Cloud.

1. Opt for HIPAA-eligible services: To ensure proper HIPAA compliance, all healthcare entities must ensure that the data is properly collected, handled, and managed. A good way to achieve that effect is by making sure that the company makes use of only HIPAA-eligible services for their digital tool. Don’t worry, AWS offers a plethora of such services.
2. Establish a robust disaster recovery process: A good compliance strategy must always include a disaster recovery plan for when something goes wrong, such as data leaks, etc. To that end, AWS not only delivers excellent backup services but also offers high-quality services such as Glacier, Amazon S3, etc. These services are conducive to the configuration of both backup and recovery processes.
3. Authentication process: With a healthcare digital solution, an important part of ensuring compliance is properly managing user access and tracking their actions. To that end, companies can make use of standards such as OAuth to give limited access to protected resources to a third party. There are other such stands as well, including the SAML open standard to enable secure handling of data.

There is no denying that running a healthcare business is a highly complicated endeavor. Combine that with the highly sensitive nature of the data healthcare companies handle and it becomes clear just why it is important to focus on ensuring compliance with HIPAA and other such regulations. AWS Cloud helps healthcare organizations ensure that thanks to the wealth of services and tools it comes equipped with. If you too want such a secure and compliant system for your healthcare organization, you should start looking for a trusted vendor for AWS cloud consulting services right away.